The James Franco Review Editorial Notes

The James Franco Review was a project-based journal that launched in 2014 to bring attention to implicit bias in the publishing industry. It's not enough to make a commitment to diversity and inclusion-- the whole process of publishing needs to be queered and reimagined. From 2014-2017 The JFR experimented with this through editors that changed every two months, no slush pile readers-- everything was chosen by the genre editor--and blind submissions, a tool that is only as effective as its user. The Facebook page launched in early November and went viral in hours. We were covered in The Stranger ♦ The LA Times ♦ Entertainment Weekly before we even had a first issue, which at the very least proved the point of what a name can do. Over two years we put out 8 general issues, an additional two on special topics, hosted 24 editors, and published 115 emerging and midcareer writers.

​The project was passed on to collaborators Monica Lewis and Nicole McCarthy in January 2017.​

"Corinne's prose explores the fluidity of desire amidst a world of violently over-simplified rules. The speakers of her pieces long to live outside the control of patriarchal family structures, yet find an eery security sleeping in constricting closets and in legal institutions like marriage. They inhabit the complexity of people who choose to be chaotic while maintaining support from “All these systems…waiting right underneath you, and if you aren’t paying attention you become complicit.” But Corinne is always there, always paying attention to that undercurrent, that interplay between rebelliousness and constraint that keeps our imaginations intact, a play in which we can become more than just stock antagonists to the system, can become real to one another, and in which 'the act of our bodies and the friction and the teeth and the bruise and the trembling are part.' " -- Matt Trease, Margin Shift Series, Seattle